Emerging Optical Wireless Communications-Advances and Challenges

New data services and applications are emerging continuously and enhancing the mobile broadband experience. The ability to cope with these varied and sophisticated services and applications will be a key success factor for the highly demanding future network infrastructure. One such technology that could help address the problem would be optical wireless communications (OWC), which presents a growing research interest in the last few years for indoor and outdoor applications. This paper is an overview of the OWC systems focusing on visible light communications, free space optics, transcutaneous OWC, underwater OWC, and optical scattering communications.